Research Implementation IMPROVING STUDENTS’ ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILL THROUGH CONTENT BASED INSTRUCTION

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B. Research Implementation

Having identified student’s problem in speaking, CBI was chosen to be the solution of the problem. The implementation of teaching speaking by using CBI through Action Research consisted of two cycles. The result of the first cycle became the consideration of the planning of the second cycle. Each cycle consisted of four meetings. Three meetings were for presenting the material and one meeting for conducting the speaking test. Every meeting lasted for ninety minutes. The overall research implementation could be seen in Table 4.6. Table 4.6 Overall Implementation of the Research Problem Students had low speaking ability Solution Teaching speaking through CBI Students The second Grade No of Cycle two Cycle 1: M1: introducing products, M2: introducing company, M3: Receiving factory visitors Planning Explaining the objective and the planned schedule for cycle 1. Giving a task in each meeting, and each meeting consists of pre-task, task, and task optimization, Using pictures, flash cards, and short passage for the class Action M1-M3: discussing and explaining the topics, giving different activities or tasks based on the topics. Students performed and recalled what they had learned at the previous stages M4: post test Observation Ss: Improved in vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, fluency and accuracy, but a few Ss still less achieved in fluency and pronunciation. Ss Could answer the teacher’s questions and felt braver to speak and actively performed with their classmates. T: well prepared the worksheet, but lack of modeling and explanation of the context. Didn’t give much time to the students to make practice CS: alive, relax and enjoyable, but a little bit noisy, group works and pair works were more effective Reflection + Ss’ motivation and participation were raised. Ss mastery in words and expressions were high; Ss could answer the teacher’s questions; and could communicate with their friends with little grammar mistake. They talked a lot in the class. - The T lacked of modeling and practice of the words pronunciation. Some Ss less achieved in fluency as they needed to take a look of the worksheet to find the related words and expressions commit to user lxi during their performance. Cycle 2: M1: telephoning, M2: booking rooms in a hotel, M3: Ordering in a restaurant Planning Revised plan is to help the students to achieve good pronunciation and fluency. Action M1-M3: discussing and explaining the topics; giving modeling and different activities to help the students to master the words and expressions, to achieve good pronunciation; giving different activities or tasks based on the topics; conducting performance review. M4: post test Observation Ss: much improved in words pronunciation and could fluently conduct the interactive dialog with their partner; became more self-confident T: explained the context very clearly; more passionate Cs: more alive, fun and relax atmosphere increased Reflection + improvement in speaking ability, the students could fluently communicate with their friends with good pronunciation; the frequency of looking at the notebook reduced; effective pair works, more enjoyable atmosphere, relaxed classroom situation founded - there were still two or three students who needed to take a look or read their notebooks when conducting their performance. The implementation of the research in its cycles was described on the following section.

1. Cycle 1

Table 4.7 The implementation of Cycle 1 p la n n in g Topics: M1. Introducing products, M2. Introducing company, M3. Receiving factory visitor, M4. Post-test - Giving a task in each meeting - Each meeting consists of pre-task, task, and task optimization - Using pictures, flash cards, and short passage A ct io n First meeting – Third meeting discussion meeting - discussing about the words and sentence patterns - practice dialogue - doing different activities about the topics - optimizing the language use Fourth meeting post test - conducting a post-test about the topics discussed commit to user lxii O b se rv at io n The Students - The learning motivation was improved in the class - Students actively took speaking turns; braver and actively engaged in the speaking activities, - The students improved in the words and grammatical forms. - They could answer the teacher’s questions - They could fluently perform the speaking task, but sometimes, some students forgot the new words, they needed to take a look at the worksheet to refresh their mind, and also mispronounced some words. - A small part of students felt a little bit shy in individual activities The Teacher - Well prepared with the worksheet - Didn’t give enough modeling and practice to the students about the vocabularies and words pronunciation - Didnt give sufficient explanation and discussion about the topic - Lacked of monitoring of the rest students while the other students took activities - Spoke too fast Classroom situation - Alive, enthusiastic - Enjoyable for various types of activities - Pair and group works were more effective - Noisy Re fl ec ti o n Strengths - Using CBI could improve students’ speaking competence such as, vocabularies, grammar, comprehension - CBI could increase students’ participation in the speaking class by the practical and interesting content. - CBI could accommodate various types of activities which are motivating the students to participate in the speaking tasks - CBI could adjust individual, pair, and group works according to the content. - Pair and group works in CBI could eliminate student’s psychological barriers and increase students’ self-confidence. Weakness - Some students still mispronounced some words. - Some students still less achieved on fluency as they forgot some new words their just learned; they still needed to stop and take a look at their worksheet - The teacher lacked of modeling about the words and expressions. - The teacher lacked of discussion about the content - The teacher gave less control to the rest students who were not in the speaking activity. The process of Cycle 1 is described in the following section. commit to user lxiii

a. Planning

Planning was the first step in doing a classroom action research. Some important things were planned in order to run the research well. 1 Time allotment The time allotment in each meeting was 90 minutes. There were four meetings in cycle one including the posttest. The detail schedule was as follows: 1 Sunday, November 14, 2010 : The first meeting 2 Wednesday, November 24, 2010 : The second meeting 3 Wednesday, December 1, 2010 : The third meeting 4 Wednesday, December 8, 2010 : The Fourth meeting 2 Teaching Materials The teaching materials were selected and prepared based on the students’ needs and interest and also meet the requirements of the college in advance. According to the major teaching plan constructed by the Dean Office of Business English Department, the teaching materials should focus on training the students’ potential communication ability, the materials selected should be standard, practical, and flexible; standard means that the teaching material cannot either be too difficult or too easy, it should match the students level; practical means the content knowledge conveyed by the teacher in the class should be used by the students both in the classroom and in the outside world or the real world; while flexible means the material or content shouldn’t be monotonous or invariable, it should be flexible and can be adjusted by the teacher to meet the students needs and interest. Moreover, before the treatment, the researcher conducted the interview with the students to get their information about their needs, interest and the problem in speaking. The students were also given chances to discuss, to talk about, and to choose what kind of content they were interested in and wanted to learn. The result shows that the students are willing to learn something useful, practical, and related to their future jobs. Hence, based on the result above, the topics selected for each meeting in Cycle 1 are as following, and at the beginning of each meeting, the teacher will ask the students if they want to discuss the topic or not: Meeting 1: Introducing products commit to user lxiv Meeting 2: Introducing Company Meeting 3: Receiving factory visitors 3 Teaching Medias The available teaching Media, such as the computer and LCD in the classroom were used. In addition, the researcher also prepared pictures and flash cards to teach the students. The teaching media functions the role to help the students not only understand the meaning of the text better, but also to let the students know how it would be used. A more attractive content or text will appeal to the students and motivate them to speak, to perform. An attractive looking content or context is more likely to grab the students’ attention rather than a page full of type. 4 Lesson plan In the first cycle, the researcher planned four meetings; three meetings for classroom discussion, and one meeting for conducting the post-test. Each discussion meeting had a topic and consisted of three phases namely pre-task, task, and task optimization, while each phase consisted of many different activities based on the topics. As mentioned previously, the students often mispronounce the words, they lack of relevant vocabularies, and they also make grammar mistakes. These are because the students seldom get chances to practice each component of the speaking. In order to help the students to master each component of the speaking skill, and also to prepare them to be well performed in the task phase, the pre-task phase was used to build the vocabularies, grammatical forms, and also to achieve the students’ pronunciation. In the pre-task phase, the researcher would try to use many different kinds of activities to build the students’ vocabularies and expressions related to the topic, and to discuss the grammatical form with them in order to well prepare them for conducting the activities in the task phase. In the task phase, the students were asked to conduct different activities, and to practice what they have learned in the pre-task. During the task, the students were hoped to speak a lot individually, in pair or in group. After the task phrase, it was followed with the task optimization; in this phase, the researcher would optimize the task by underlining or reviewing the sentence patterns and vocabularies or expressions dealing with the language that the students just had learned, and asked the students to talk or practice the topic from different necessary aspects logically if there still had time left. commit to user lxv

b. Implementing the Action

1 First Meeting a Opening the class It was a warm Sunday afternoon usually there were no meetings on Sunday, but that day they had meeting in order to substitute the meeting on next Wednesday as the students would hold Sport Meet on next Wednesday. The bell rang at 14: 10, and the researcher entered the classroom with her collaborator, Miss Zeng, an English teacher of this college. The researcher greeted the students “Good afternoon everybody” and the students replied “Good afternoon teacher.” eagerly. Then, researcher checked the students’ attendance list. There were nine students who were absent that day. The total numbers of the students in this class were thirty-eight students; thirty-six female students and two male students. b Main activity 1 Pre-task The researcher started the class by asking the students some leading questions. She asked the students what kinds of aspects did they care about when they buying some items, such as stationary in the store or supermarket and how the people in the store introduced the items to them. The students listed vocabularies on many aspects while the researcher was writing them down on the blackboard. After the leading questions, the researcher introduced the topic that they were going to learn in that meeting. The researcher distributed the work sheets to the students and started the activity. She asked the students to read the new words after her in activity one first and then she asked them to look at the pictures on the worksheet or the screen to match the pictures with its right words. Most of the students did a good job; they could match the pictures with its right words and could easily identify which were office equipments and which were office stationeries. However, there were also some students who couldn’t match the shredder, sellotape stapler, stamp, and notepad with their right pictures as these words were new to them, one of the students also asked how to use the clipboard. The researcher explained to them respectively. commit to user lxvi After that, the researcher continued to Activity 2. At the beginning, she asked the students to read the new words after her again, and then she asked the students to speak out the new words according to the flash cards that she was showing to them. The students blurted out the words very quickly; once the researcher showed them the flash cards, they strived to be the first and feared to lag behind. However, there were some students who mispronounced the words during the activity. The researcher corrected the words by speaking it again, and the students read after her. After making sure the students didn’t have any problem with the pronunciation, they moved to Activity 3. In Activity 3, the students were asked to read the words after the researcher, and then, fill a table by putting the vocabularies into their correct categories. Before filling the table, the researcher discussed the vocabularies in the list with the students; she found that some students were not familiar with the words about quality, and most of them were not familiar with the vocabularies about the shape; she explained the meaning of the vocabularies related to the quality. To help them recognize and get the meaning of the words about different shapes; she drew many different shapes on the blackboard, and wrote down the meaning. In order to make sure the students could master the words about shape in short time, the researcher deleted the words and kept the shapes only on the blackboard; she pointed the shapes on the blackboard and asked the students to speak out their relative words. At the beginning, the students reacted very slow, but after few times, they could easily identify the shapes; they felt excited and blurted out the words very quickly when the researcher moved from one shape to another. Seeing the students could easily identify each category and fill the table, the researcher went to Activity 4. In this activity, firstly, the researcher explained that when they introduce products, they needed to tell people the basic feature about the products such as their material, colour, size or specification, place of production, price and quality , so in this activity, they should pay attention to these aspects as these aspects were very basic and necessary for introducing products. After the explanation, the students were asked to work in pairs to discuss and create the basic information about the different products in the flash cards according to the given example. After they finished creating the basic information about the products, they were also asked to work in pairs to ask and answer questions with each other. During the activity, the collaborator and researcher walked around the class to commit to user lxvii monitor the students’ activity. All the students were focused on the activity, only one student who was playing her hand phone, when the researcher was getting closer to her; she then put the hand phone away. In order to check the students’ understanding, the researcher asked the questions as listed on the worksheet to a student. At the beginning, the student didn’t want to answer the questions; she felt a little bit shy and looked at other students. The researcher encouraged her by saying that “ don’t be shy, it doesn’t matter if you say something wrong. We all are still learning, let’s learn together; just try you best ok?” She also gave an example of how to answer such kinds of questions. After that, the girl started to answer the questions: Teacher: Would you like to show me the folder? There was a folder next to her table, which belongs to the collaborator. Student: Ok, here it is. Teacher: Wow, Superb What is it made of? Student: It is made of good papers and these papers are made of good wood. The outside cover is made of plastic. En….It is very smooth and hard, you can put your hand here, smooth right? Touch Teacher: What color is it? Student: This one is white, but we still have other colors, such as green, red and so on. Teacher: Where is it produced? Student: It is produced in Guangzhou. Teacher: What size is it? Student: It is 50x2x45 centimeters Teacher: Do you have the folder in size A4 and A5. Student: Oh, yes, yes, we have. Teacher: What about the shape? Student: It is rectangle. Teacher: How much does it cost? Student: It is Twenty yuan for one book, but if you need more, we can give you discount. “ You see, you could do it and you did it well.” the researcher said to this student. The researcher also asked the rest students if they had any questions about the words and sentence patterns that they learned above, but there was no problem, therefore, she continued to the task phase. 2 Task Performance commit to user lxviii In the task phase, the students worked in pairs; after the students found their partners, the researcher explained the way of conducting the task. There were two tasks in this phase. The first task was a description task. In this task, the students were asked to write down the description of a product and then took roles to practice the dialogue. The second task was a role-play activity. All students were involved in this activity; one of the students took the role of seller, and the rest students took the role of buyer. They started with the first task. In this task, each member of the pairs needed to write down the detail description of a product such as photocopier, and then compared their own writings with their partner to optimize a better description of the product. After this, the pairs were asked to take the role to read the dialogue on the worksheet including the description that they just created. The students were also asked to underline the words for describing about quality in the dialogue. During the task, the collaborator and the researcher monitored their activity from one pair to another. This time, there were no students talking other things or playing hand phones. The collaborator told the researcher that was so surprising. Ten minutes later, the researcher asked if they had finished their task or not, but they told her not yet, so the researcher gave them another five minutes more to do their tasks. After the students had finished their writing, she checked the result by asking them to present their writing. The researcher told the students that she would like to ask some students to present their works. She asked a pair next to the platform to present the dialogue and their pair work writing. Once the students had finished her presentation, another pair was asked to present their pair work. The researcher almost was going to call another pair; she asked if there were any volunteers and if there were any students who wanted come to present in the front of the class. Surprisingly, one student said that “ teacher don’t call, we would like to present ours.” The researcher was so surprised, and she told the rest students that they should be like her, to be a volunteer and to be braver. She asked the rest students to give applause to this student. As the time was limited, the researcher stopped the students’ presentation at the fifth pairs. She told the other five pairs of the rest students that they could practice the dialogue listed in the worksheet in the front of the class. The students practiced the dialogue one pair by one pair. She noticed that there were some common mistakes that the students had made; these mistakes were about pronunciation commit to user lxix and the grammar. Some students mispronounced the words. She listed the mispronounced words on the blackboard and asked the students to read it after her. She also corrected some grammar mistakes such as the tense, is was, etc., and prepositional phrase; made in and made of and etc . After conducting the first task, they came to the second task in ACTIVITY 6. The second task was a role-play activity based on the real condition that usually occurred in the working filed. In this activity, one student worked as the seller and the rest students worked as the buyers. The seller needed to introduce her product to the buyers in many different aspects as possible. If the seller could make a good introduction of the products, the buyers would consider that they might buy the office products, otherwise, vice versa. However, they needed to list the reasons why they wanted or didn’t want to buy that product. Personally, the researcher thought that male was braver than female, so in order to make a good start, she asked a male student to start this activity. Fortunately, the student came to the front of the class immediately once the researcher called him. The student took a flash card from the researcher and started introduce the product, while the other students listened carefully and made notes. The students tried hard to describe his product. After he finished the presentation, he asked the buyers the rest students if they wanted to buy his product or not, if they said no, they must explain why they didn’t want buy it. This activity was fun, exciting, and meaningful. At the beginning of the presentation activity, some students couldn’t speaking fluently; they stopped and had to take a glance at the worksheet to find the related words to describe the products, they also needed to find what was the next point to present. However, it was great to see that the following presentations were getting better one by one as their learned and got experience from the previous presentation. However, as the time was limited and the researcher needed to continue the last phase, she had to stop the following presentation that would be presented by the left students. The left students felt disappointed as they hadn’t introduced their products. 3 Task Optimization This phase was conducted at 15: 40, the last ten minutes before the class was over. In this phase, the researcher gave comments and suggestions to the students about commit to user lxx all their performance. She gave a quick review for the words and sentences about describing the quality that the students underlined in the dialogue as listed on the worksheet. She also made a review of how to answer the common questions usually for asking products and how to introduce the products logically or orderly. c Closing the class As the bell was ringing, the researcher said thanks to the students for their attention and good performance. Before she left, she said goodbye and asked the students not to forget to study at home. 2 Second Meeting a Opening the class The researcher started the class by greeting the students “Good afternoon everybody”, and the students responded “Good afternoon teacher” in an enthusiastic way. After that she checked the students’ attendance list; there were four students absent that day. As there were nine students absent in last meeting, and also because the interval between the first meeting and this meeting was a little bit longer than usual, so, the researcher thought it was necessary to make a review of what they had learned in last meeting. She asked the student whether they still remembered what they had learned in last meeting. The students replied “yes, introducing products” loudly. She also asked them “ how to introduce products?” the students kept silent. She changed the way of asking them “ what are the basic aspects we need to mention when we introduce the products?” The students mentioned the material, the color, the specification…….. The researcher said to the students: “great, you still remember, but remembering is not enough, you also need to practice it, please practice with your friends after class ok?” The students replied “yes, ok” and they made faces and laughed at each other. The researcher told the students that last time they had learned about introducing products, that day, they would discuss about introducing company. This opening took five minutes. b Main activity 1 Pre-task The researcher distributed the worksheet to the students and asked them to read the short passage carefully to fill the table under the short passage in ACTIVITY 1. This activity was to build the necessary vocabularies and sentences patterns needed for commit to user lxxi describing a company. Before the activity, the researcher discussed the short passage one sentence by one sentence, and told the students that when introducing a company, some necessary aspects needed to be addressed; the basic aspects were including the background of the company, the location of the company, the products and the employees etc. After discussing the short passage, the researcher gave the students five minutes to read the short passage again and asked them to pay attention to the basic aspects as she mentioned early. After they finished reading the short passage, the researcher asked them if they understood the short passage or not; were there any difficulties for this short passage. Only two or three students sitting together said that the short passage was a little difficult, and the rest students said that the short passage was not difficult and they understood it, but there were some vocabularies in the short passage they didn’t know and the researcher should write down the phonetic symbol. The researcher asked the students which words they didn’t know, they told her that they didn’t know the meaning of the words, such as, peripherals, dedicated, maintenance. She explained the meaning and wrote down the phonetic symbols of these words to the students respectively. She also asked the students to read these words after her. After that, she asked the students to fill the table in ACTIVITY 1. In Activity 1, students were asked to fill a table; students were required to find the related vocabularies or phrases from the short passage and put it in its relevant categories. Doing this activity, the researcher asked two students to come to the stage to fill the table by writing them down on the blackboard. After they finished, she checked their answers, they did it well, but one of the students wrote the name of the place as mentioned in the short passage in the location category instead of writing down the phrases, which described the location in the location category. The researcher explained that they needed to write the phrases or sentences that described the different aspects of the company. She also asked the rest students about their answers. Were they all correct? They told her that their answers were almost the same as the students who wrote on the black board. In order to help the students to master the words and phrases in the table, the researcher moved to ACTIVITY 2. The students were asked to discuss with their partner and answer questions. After five minutes, she asked a student to stand up to answer the commit to user lxxii questions about the short passage in ACTIVITY 2. The student could answer well, but felt hesitate to pronounce the words of maintenance and peripherals. The researcher asked her and the rest students to read these two words after her. The students answered the questions as follows: - It is a Computer Technology company. - It is was established in 1998. - It is located near one of the largest electronic markets in China. - There are twenty professionals there. - There are more than 300 excellent employees. - Their product is mini laptop computers. - It is special. It is made of good quality material. -They are dedicated to the research, development and maintenance of the netbooks and computer peripherals. After the students finished, the researcher asked the rest students if they had any problem so far; but there were no problems so far. So, they moved to the task phase. 2 Task Performance In this stage, the students were asked to work in groups to make a presentation of introducing companies. The researcher explained the way of conducting this activity to the students. She divided the students into six groups; each group consisted of six students. As there were four students absent that day, one group consisted of four students. In conducting this activity, the members of each group had to discuss and create a short passage of introducing a company based on the points listed on the worksheet with each other and then the group presented it in the front of the class; each member of the group had to present a point. Before the students went to perform the activity, the researcher explained the words and sentence patterns listed on the worksheet that the students might use in the following activity. She asked the students to read these words and sentence patterns after her. She also asked them to make drills for these words and sentence patterns. After the students had no problem with that, she told the students that they could start to discuss and create an introduction of a company with their group members. During their discussion phase, the collaborator and the researcher walked around the classroom to monitor the students’ activity. There was a student asking the researcher: “teacher, what kind of company do we need to create?” The researcher told commit to user lxxiii her that “any kind of company, for example, you can present a garment company, a toy company. You can use your imagination to create the name of the company, the number of employees and etc. You can take the short passage on the worksheet as an example.” She asked the rest students if they understood what she was talking about and if they knew the procedure of conducting this activity, they told her that they understood. After few minutes, the researcher asked the first group to come to the platform to introduce their “company.” In order to make the rest students not do any other things, she told them that they had to listen carefully and make notes, because she might ask them to present what the other groups presented about as stated in ACTIVITY 4. During the presentation of the first group, there was a student who didn’t know how to say “ 学士学 位（ bachelor degree ） ” in English, however, her group member next to her told her this word. The performance of this group was generally good; most members of this group spoke well, but due to many members and they didn’t organize the turn order well, they lost who was the next person to present after the previous student. After they finished their performance, the researcher gave them comments, and she told the rest groups to pay attention to the organization of their group work; they should make a clear mind on who was the next member of the previous member to continue the presentation. The rest groups were asked to present one by one. They performed well; they didn’t have many mistakes, only sometimes, some students mispronounced the words and got a little bit stuck during the presentation. As there were only twelve minutes left, the researcher stopped the Activity 4. She asked the students to practice it after class. They moved to the task optimization phase. 3 Task Optimization In this phase, the researcher gave comments and suggestions to the students about all their performance. She also made a review of the words or phrase and sentence patterns that were usually used in introducing a company. Moreover, she stressed some aspects that were necessary for introducing a company. c Closing the class As the bell was ringing, the researcher asked the students if they had any problem in this meeting they could ask her, but there were no problems. One of the students told her that “ no, teacher.” in a funny tone. The class was ended in laugh. commit to user lxxiv 3 Third Meeting a Opening the class It was a nice and warm afternoon. The collaborator and the researcher entered the classroom. They greeted the students and the researcher checked the students’ attendance list. There were two students absent. After asking the student’s condition, the researcher started the lesson. b Main activity 1 Pre-task Before the researcher introduced the topic that the students were going to learn that day, she gave some warm up questions by asking: “ Have you ever received visitors when you were at home?” The students replied: “ yes” The researcher gave a further question: “ then, what did you do when you receiving that visitor?” “ 泡茶 , they said in Chinese make tea , asked him to sit down” they replied eagerly and loudly. The researcher said: “ yes, make tea and ask him to sit down, well, do you know how to receive visitors in a company?” The students shaked their heads and kept silent. The researcher asked them that if they would like to learn how to receive visitors in a workplace in that meeting. They smiled and said ok. The researcher distributed the worksheet to the students. They started with ACTIVITY 1, the words and sentence patterns that the students might use in the following activities. First, the researcher explained the words and sentence patterns to the students. Next, she asked the students to read the words and sentence patterns after her. After this, she gave the students few minutes to practice with their friend and asked them to use it to make sentences. She walked around the class and monitored the students; at first, the students read the words and expressions loudly, later, they stopped reading and started to make sentences with their friends. They were very concentrated on the task. Few minutes later, the researcher asked some students to read the sentences that they made. She also asked all the students to read the words and expressions together. There were no big mistakes, only the stress of the words. Hence, the researcher led the students read the words and expressions again, and moved to the ACTIVITY 2. commit to user lxxv In this activity, firstly, the researcher explained and discussed the dialogues with the students. After the students had got a concept of the dialogue, they were asked to work in pairs to discuss and to take roles to practice the long dialogue and then answer her questions. The collaborator and the researcher monitored the students’ activity. There were no students chatting or doing other things. Ten minutes had past; the students were still practicing the dialogue. They seemed like practicing dialogue very much. The researcher stopped them and asked them to answer her questions based on the dialogue. They could understand the researcher’s questions and could answer the questions easily. The problem was that they had to look at their worksheet when they answered the questions and they also gave the answers almost the same as in the dialogue. The researcher told them that they should keep the key information on their notebook and it should be better if they could answer the questions using their own words; but they told her that the answers were a little bit long, they could not remember it. 2 Task performance In the task phase, the researcher gave a picture to the students and asked them to do the task in activity 3. In this activity, the students were asked to work in pairs to create a dialogue between the vistor and the secretary based on the picture the researcher just gave them. The sectretary was supposed to receive the visitor and to show him around her factory. When they were creating the dialouge, they should cover some points as stated in the worksheet in activity 3; they could take the activity 2 as an example. This activity took fourty-five minutes. Ten minutes were used by the students to discuss and create a dialouge with her or his partner, and the left time was used to perform the dialouge they created. After the students finished creating the dialouges, the researcher asked them to perform their dialouges in the front of the class one pair by one pair. They were eagerly taking the turns and most of the students performed the role-play well. However, there were some students who could not speak fluently as they didn’t know how to say some words in English. there were also a small part of students who could not leave their papers during the performance; they still needed to take a look at it, but not frequently. Seeing that, the researcher still felt a little bit happy as the students were improving and there were no students doing other things in the class and all of them commit to user lxxvi concentrated on the task; the atmosphere in the whole classroom was easy and alive. One of the pair performed their dialouge as follows: The Vistor : Dong dong dong…………a student stood outside the classroom and knocked the door The Secretary : Come in, Please the vistor came in May I help you? The Vistor : Oh, yes, My name is J.Handy. I would like to meet Mr. Henry. The Secretary : Oh, nice to meet you Mr. Handy. I am Betty Plant, the secretary of Mr. Henry. Shake hands Please sit down and have a cup of coffee. I am going to call Mr. Henry that you are here. Oh, I am sorry; Mr. Henry is still on the way. Would I have the pleasure to show you around our factory? The Visitor : Sure, lead on please. The Secretary : First, please let me introduce our factory to you. Our factory was established in 1996. It is located on Yue Lu district. The transportation there is very convenient and the 风景 scenery there is very beautiful. You will see it later. The Secretary : Welcome to our factory. Let me show you the display hall. The Visitor : Wow. So many computers The Secretary : Yes, we have many kinds of computer as you see. They are made of good quality materials. Our products are in good demand; they were sold to many countries, like Middle East, Korea and so on. The Visitor : May I ask where you get the raw material? The Secretary : We get our raw material from Japanese. Japan The Visitor : How is the production capacity? The Secretary : Our annual output is 8,500,000 pieces. Our factory has good and advance machines and we have five production lines. Our staffs are hard-working and have rich experience. The Visitor : oh, very good. Thank you. The Secretary : You are welcome As the time was limited, the researcher stopped the students’ performance and asked them to practice after class. 3 Task-Optimizing In the last ten minutes, the researcher gave comments and suggestions to the students about all their performance. Besides, she also made a review of the words and sentence patterns, including some key words in the dialogue for introducing the factory. c Closing the class commit to user lxxvii As the bell was ringing, the researcher asked the students’ progress and their feeling about the content. Most students said that it was practical and useful, they mastered many vocabularies. However, there were a few students who felt that the content in that meeting was a little bit difficult. The researcher told them to review and study at home and asked them to attend the class and not to be late for next meeting as there will be a test. She ended the class at 16:00. 4 Fourth Meeting a Opening the class At 14:10, the bell was ringing; the researcher entered the classroom and greeted the students. After checking the attendance, she told the students that that day they would conduct a post test. b Conducting the test The researcher explained the way of conducting the test. The test consisted of three instruments. The first instrument was about introducing a product according to the picture. There were four pictures with four products; students could choose one of the products to introduce. The second instrument was about introducing a company; the students could introduce any kind of company, but had to cover some necessary points, while the third instrument was that the students took the role of a secretary of a company to receive a guest who wanted to visit the factory. The students were asked to take one instrument only and the instrument was given randomly by the researcher, and the students were asked to take the test randomly. In this way, all the students could be ready to take their turns. The students were called one by one to come to the front of the class to present their topic. The collaborator and the researcher gave the score to each student. The test ran well. There was no problem with their performance. c Closing the class Having finished the test, the researcher gave general review about the students’ performance; most of the students did the speaking test well. In addition, she also encouraged the students to be relaxed in taking test next time and be more self-confident in speaking. commit to user lxxviii

c. Observation

The observation was aimed at observing the effects of the action conducted in the class. It was conducted during the teaching and learning process by the collaborator and the researcher. The focuses of the observation were the students, the teacher, and the teaching and learning process when the approach of Content-based Instruction was applied in the class. The result of the observation was described as follows: In the first meeting, the teacher well prepared the worksheet with various activities in the lesson. When the teacher distributed the worksheet to the students, the students felt curious as their former teacher often asked them to read a story. The students seemed much liked the topic and felt interested in the content. When the teacher asked the students to do different vocabulary activities in the pre-task phase, the students felt happy, and eagerly followed her instruction. During the activity, most of the students were actively engaged in the pair and groups works, and a few students felt shy in individual works; a student was asked by the teacher to answer questions, the students felt shy, after encouraged by the teacher, she answered the teacher’s question, and answered well. Nevertheless, as there were many students in the class, the teacher couldn’t monitor every student; there was a student found playing hand phone during the class. In line with the students’ speaking ability, there were many new words in that lesson; even though the teacher led the students read the words dealing with the topic once or twice at the beginning, some students still mispronounced the words and felt hesitate to pronounce the words during the activity. Furthermore, there were a small part of students who made some simple grammar mistakes. In addition, during the presentation activity, some students couldn’t speak fluently; they had to stop and take a look at the worksheet to find the relevant vocabularies and also need to check what the next point to be presented was. Generally speaking, the students’ performances were good, they spoke better than before; this could be seen especially on the performance of the later part of the students, there were no many mistakes found on the grammar, their pronunciation was better than before. They also could speak more fluently as they got the experience from the previous students and also be told not to rely on the worksheet. commit to user lxxix In the second meeting, the atmosphere of the class was alive, and also a little bit chaos. In this lesson, the teacher asked the students to conduct a large group activity; the students felt excited and much enjoyed in the activity. In the group work, the students helped each other by reminding their group members’ speaking turns and also told their members the relevant vocabularies when they needed. Unlike the first meeting, in the second meeting, the teacher prepared the vocabularies with phonetic symbol, it was hoped that the students could make a better pronunciation. However, before the activity the teacher didn’t give detail explanation about the procedure of conducting the task or activity as there were some students asking something about how to do the task, and some students of a group were confused who was the next member to present in the activity. As for the students’ performance in the activity, most of the students performed well; they didn’t make many mistakes, only a few students, sometimes, mispronounced the words and got a little bit stick by saying “ en…” and took a look at their papers. In the third meeting, the collaborator and the researcher found that the students were more active and more concentrated on their study. There were no students chatting other things or playing hand phones. In addition, the students were found like practicing dialogue and role-play activities; they early took the turn to practice the role play, and they practiced the dialogue with their partner loudly. For their speaking abilities, their speaking ability was getting better; most of the students could speak well. They could accurately and fluently practice the dialogue. However, there were also a small part of students who mispronounced the words and the word stress. Moreover, there still were some students who had taken a look at their papers during the performance as they thought the content in this meeting was a little bit difficult to them. All in all, based on the observation, it could be concluded that the students had high participation in the speaking class; most of the students were willing to take their turns when the teacher asked them to speak or perform during the speaking activity; however, there were few students who lacked confidence and felt a little bit shy when they were asked to speak individually, but this was reduced in the pair and group work. In the pair and group work, the students felt fun and exciting; they spoke in a more relax commit to user lxxx way. This was especially indicated when they were asked to work in pairs to play a role play activity. They seemed like playing role-play activity. Moreover, the students’ speaking ability was also improved during the first cycle. When the students were asked to talk something about the topics, they could talk a lot and most of the students could speak well and could make full use of the words, expressions, and sentence patterns discussed at the meeting. However, there was also a small part of students who forgot the words and sentence patters during their performance, and had to take a look at their paper. This didn’t happen very frequently and it didn’t really affect much about their language. There were also a few students who felt a little bit hesitant to pronounce some words and mispronounced the words. Besides, there were also some students who made the simple grammatical mistakes for asking and answering questions. However, in general, the students’ speech was understandable; it could be classified into the acceptable level. From the observation, we know that the teacher, the researcher, had prepared the teaching material well; the teacher provided very detail worksheet with many different tasks or activities to motivate and guide the students to learn the language. The teacher could encourage the students’ participation by asking the students to perform individually, in pairs, and in groups according to various different types of activities as stated in the worksheet. In addition, the topics and the content selected both meet the school’s requirements, and the students’ needs and interests; although few students said that the content was a little bit difficult, in general these students were still satisfied with it and would accept it. However, it could be noted that there were some points which were not good with the teacher; firstly, the teacher didn’t give enough explanation and modeling to the students for the word expressions and word pronunciations; secondly, the teacher didn’t give much time to the students for practicing the new words and sentence patterns. Thirdly, as there were many students in the class, the collaborator noted that the teacher lacked of monitoring for the students who were sitting while the other students were asked to perform at the front of class. Moreover, the teacher also spoke very fast in giving explanation about the lessons; some students had difficulty to catch with her. commit to user lxxxi The teaching and learning process was successful. The atmosphere in the classroom was alive. The students were eagerly following and conducting the speaking tasks and activities assigned by the teacher. Pair and group works were better than individual works as the students didn’t feel shy and not afraid of making mistakes as they felt they were not performing alone, they would be helped and corrected by their group members.

d. Interview after the implementation of Cycle 1

After the implementation of cycle 1, the researcher conducted an interview with the students to get their viewpoint about teaching by CBI. When she asked the students if CBI was improving their speaking skill or not, almost all of the students said that it was effective and their speaking skill was improved; they had something to say; they could talk a lot; because CBI helped them to learn many useful vocabularies and sentence patterns. Moreover, when they were asked to talk about the content, although there were a few students said that the content was a little bit difficult, most of them said that the content was not difficult, it was useful and practical; they would like to learn it as it was good for their future jobs. The researcher also asked the students if they felt braver to speak English in the next meeting. They told her that they felt braver to speak English than before; because there were many pair and group activities in CBI, they were not speaking English alone; they spoke English with their friends in the activity in the class. The activities were fun and exciting that made them want to say. Besides, most of the activities were speaking activities; when they always spoke in the activities, they felt their speaking ability was improving, and they didn’t feel shy to speak English. When the researcher asked the students what were the strengths and the weaknesses of CBI. The students said that the strengths were that firstly, the content was very good; it was useful and practical for their future jobs; they would like to learn it. Secondly, there were many different speaking activities applied in CBI, so that they could have fun while learning the language. Furthermore, they had something to say about the topic and also had many chances to practice their oral English; unlike before, in CBI, they learned logical thinking, they had learned how to talk about the topic. When the researcher asked the students what were the negative aspects they found in the four commit to user lxxxii meetings, some of the students replied that so far they found the teacher moved a little bit fast from one activity to another and the teacher didn’t give sufficient explanation about the text. They also said that in the speaking activity, especially the group activities, when they work with their partner or group members, sometimes, their partner got stuck and slowed down; that made them felt embarrassed.

e. Reflection

This phase was aimed to analyze and evaluate the final result of the action conducted in the first cycle. Based on the interview and the observation in the first cycle, the collaborator and the researcher reflected that there were some positive and negative aspects of the implementation of CBI in cycle 1. 1 The positive aspects were as follows: a The students’ speaking ability was improved. They made great progress on each aspect of the speaking skill, the passing grade of each aspect was 13, and the passing grade for the whole aspects was 65, most of the students’ mean score of the grammar, vocabulary, and comprehension were above the passing grade. Being taught useful vocabularies and word expressions dealing with the topics, the students could speak a lot with proper words and better pronunciation. Most of them could accurately and fluently communicate with their friends based the given topics, and the mother tongue use was reduced. Moreover, as the students learned many sentence patterns, the students could understand the teacher’s questions and answer the teacher’s questions with proper grammatical forms. b The students’ participation in the speaking activities was increased. They were more active than before. They felt eager to join the activities as they liked the content, and thought it was practical and useful to their future jobs. The students spoke a lot during the teaching and learning process; most of the students early took the turns and tried very hard to make their activity or performance better. c Pair and Group works were beneficial for eliminating psychological barriers in speaking. Students felt more confident and didn’t feel shy in pair and group works. 2 However, there were also some negative aspects which were observed and identified as follows: commit to user lxxxiii a The improvement for the students’ speaking skill was not so high, even though, there was improvement in the students’ grade for each indicator; it was still far from what was expected. Some students were still less achieved in the fluency and felt weak in the words pronunciation. Some of the student’s mean score on fluency and pronunciation were below the passing grade. Moreover, the passing grade to the whole aspects was 65, and it was hoped that sixty-five percents students could pass the passing grade. The students score can be seen in Appendix 8. b Based on the observation and the interview with the students, the teacher was told that she was less in monitoring of these students who were not performing while other students were performing. In addition, the teacher was told that she didn’t give sufficient modeling and drilling practice to the students, and she lacked discussion and explanation about the content, such as the short passage and the dialogue in the worksheet. 5 Suggestions Based on the reflection stated above, it could be seen that CBI brought many positive aspects. However, there were also many weaknesses found during the teaching and learning process and they should be solved to get a better result. In view of this, the researcher considered that it was a necessary to revise the action plan for the next cycle to 1 improve students’ pronunciation, 2 improve students’ fluency.

2. Cycle 2

Table 4.8 The Implementation of Cycle 2 p la n n in g Topics: M1.Telephoning, M2. Booking Rooms in a Hotel, M3. Ordering in a Restaurant, M4. Post-test Revised plan is to solve the students’ problem in pronunciation and the mastery of words to achieve the fluency. Each meeting consists of pre-task and performance commit to user lxxxiv A cti o n First meeting – Third meeting discussion meeting - Giving discussion about the words and sentence patterns - Giving modeling about the words and sentence patterns. - Students made drills and practiced the pronunciation of words and sentence patterns in different activities. - Students were asked to conduct individual, pair, and group performance. Fourth meeting post test - Having speaking test about the topics discussed o b se rv ati o n The Students - Showed improvement in the pronunciation. - Well mastered the words and sentence patterns with the related topics. - Most of the students didn’t take a look or read their notebook during their performance. - Could fluently and accurately conduct the activities with their friends. - Students’ self-confidence was increased; they were no longer afraid of making mistakes The teacher - Prepared the teaching material - Gave modeling and much time to the students to make practice - Explained the context more clearly - Gave interesting activity in teaching English - More passionate The Classroom situation - More alive - Fun and enjoyable atmosphere Re fl ec tio n Strength - CBI could improve students’ speaking ability. The teacher could choose the interesting and practical content to meet the students’ needs. - The activities in speaking class could be adjusted to improve the students’ different speaking aspects; by giving much modeling and different activities to the students, the students could produce good pronunciation. - The fluency and accuracy in the speaking could be achieved by giving more portions to the words and grammatical forms. - Different activities and students working in groups increased the student participation in the speaking class. Weakness - There were still two or three students who depended on the worksheet when conducting the activities. - It was not easy to choose the topics to meet all of the students’ interest. The process of Cycle 2 is described in the following section.

a. Revised Planning

commit to user lxxxv 1 Time allotment The time allotment in each meeting was 90 minutes. There were still four meetings in cycle two including the posttest. The detail schedule is as follows: 1 Wednesday, December 15, 2010 : The first meeting 2 Wednesday, December 22, 2010 : The second meeting 3 Wednesday, December 29, 2010 : The third meeting 4 Wednesday, January 5, 2011 : The Fourth meeting 2 Teaching Materials The topics selected for Cycle 2 are based on both the requirements of the school and the needs and interest of the students, after discussing with the collaborative teacher, in the second cycle, the researcher adjusted the content and tasks to eliminate the students’ weaknesses found in Cycle 1. There will be various activities based on the content to improve the students’ speaking ability, and it is also hoped that the students would feel more interested and wouldn’t have difficulty about it. The topics for each meeting are as follows: Meeting 1: Telephoning Meeting 2: Booking rooms in hotel Meeting 3: Ordering in the restaurant 3 Teaching Medias The available teaching media, such as computer, LCD in the classroom were used. 4 Lesson plan Based on the result of the reflection of Cycle one, the collaborator and the researcher discussed and revised the plan for Cycle two as it was stated above that in the first cycle, there were some students who were less achieved in pronunciation and fluency. These students mispronounced the words and sometimes felt hesitate to pronounce the new words and expressions, and there were also some students who couldn’t speak fluently and had to take a look at their worksheet during the speaking activity. As analyzed previously, the teacher didn’t give enough modeling and didn’t give much time or many activities to the students to practice. commit to user lxxxvi In order to achieve a better result, hence, the plan for cycle one was revised and showed as follows: there were still four meetings, three meetings were used for classroom discussion, and one meeting was used for conducting the post-test. In order to effectively use the time, the discussion meeting was divided into two phases only, namely pre-task and performance. In the pre-task activity, the teacher will give enough modeling to the students and give them more time to make drills or to make practice for the words pronunciation. Moreover, various classroom activities will be applied to help the students to achieve their pronunciation and fluency; meanwhile, before the performance activity, the teacher will give sufficient discussion about the content so that the students could have a logical thinking and could show their maximum ability in their speaking performance. While in the task phase, the students were asked to work in pair and groups to practice and perform what they have learned in the pre-task phase. The teacher will also give sufficient review and comments for their performance.

b. Implementing the Action

1 First Meeting a Opening the class It was a heavy snowing afternoon. The weather was very cold, but the students felt excited as it was the first time of snowing in this year. As the bell was ringing, the researcher greeted the students checked the students’ attendance list, there were three students absent and three students came few minutes later after she started her teaching. b Main activity 1 Pre-task Before introducing the topic to the students, the researcher asked some leading questions about the topic that they were going to learn in that meeting. She asked the students if they ever made and received a telephone call in English and what the first words to say when they were make and receive a phone call. Some students replied her that wei, hello, who are you? I’m….; this is……………etc. The researcher explained that when making or receiving a phone call in English, they could not use wei as wei was a Chinese, and they could not use who are you for asking who is calling, instead, they should ask who is calling or who is speaking. The researcher told the students that they commit to user lxxxvii would learn such expressions, after that she introduced to the students that that day they were going to learn telephoning. The researcher distributed the worksheet to the students and asked them to read the words and expressions after her. After several times, she told the students that she would like them to play a competitive game; that was, the researcher saying Chinese of the words and expressions while the students translated it into English orally without looking at the worksheet. She divided the students into three large groups, and told them that the group which could firstly blurt out the words and expression with many students in their group was the winner group, and the losing group would be punished to turn off the LCD and computer after she finished the meeting. Before the activity, the researcher gave a few minutes to the students to make drills and memorize the words and expressions. After that, she said some expressions about making and receiving phone calls, leaving and taking messages, and some other vocabularies about telephoning as listed on the worksheet in Chinese. The students translated it into English orally and they could correctly blurt out the words and expressions quickly; they seemed remembered and mastered the words and expressions. In order to make sure everyone of them fully understand and remember the words and expressions, she asked some students from different groups to translate her Chinese words and expression individually, all of them could speak well and could easily master and remember the meaning of the words and expressions, but some of them spoke very fast and didn’t completely pronounced the words. The researcher told the students that they should speak slowly and pronounce the words clearly and also should fully pronounce every alphabet of the word. Seeing the students didn’t have problem in ACTIVITY 1, she moved to ACTIVITY 2. In ACTIVITY 2, the students were asked to practice a short telephoning dialogue with their partners and then answer the researcher’s questions. Five minutes later, the researcher asked a student to answer her questions based on the dialogue. Here following was the dialogue conducted by the researcher and the student: Teacher: Who is calling? Student: Mr. Kale. Teacher: Can Mr. Kale talk to Ms. Allysa? Student: No. Teacher: Why cannot Mr. Kale talk to Ms. Allysa? commit to user lxxxviii Student: Because she is not in. Teacher: What do you think about the secretary? Is she professional? Student: yes. Teacher: Are you sure? The student kept silent, another student beside her replied: “no, because the secretary asked Mr. Kale is that all.” The researcher asked the rest students what were their answers. They said no loudly. The researcher said to the students that they were right. She explained the short dialogue and told the students that as a secretary it was better didn’t ask that and it was not polite to ask that kind of questions. After that, she also asked the students if they had any problem of this short dialogue. They told her that they didn’t have any problem with this dialogue, so the researcher moved to ACTIVITY 3 and ACTIVITY 4. In ACTIVITY 3, the researcher discussed and explained these two dialogues as listed on the worksheet with the students. After that the students were asked to practice the dialogues and to find out the sentence patterns that were used for making and receiving a phone call as they learned in activity one. During their activity, the researcher and the collaborator walked around the class to monitor the students’ activity; there were no students chatting or playing hand phones. They practiced the dialogues with their partner very loudly. There was no difficulty for them to find out and underline the word expressions. In ACTIVITY 4, the students were asked to fill some blank spaces in a short dialogue of taking message. After few minutes, the researcher asked the students if they finished or not. They told her that they had finished. In order to check the students’ understanding, the researcher asked a student to read the dialogue with her answer. However, the student chose the wrong answer for blank 3. After the student finished reading the dialogue, the researcher asked the rest student whether the student’s answers were correct or wrong. The students told her that the answer of blank 3 was wrong, it should be d. tell him everything is all right. The researcher said yes, and explained the short dialogue of how to take a message to the students. After making sure the students understood the short dialogue, she continued to the performance phase. 2 Task Performance commit to user lxxxix In the performance phase, the students were asked to take a role-play information-gap activity. Before the activity, the researcher explained the way of conducting the performance and also distributed two different cards with detail schedule information to the students. The students were asked to work in pairs to create and practice dialogues based on the schedule card that the researcher gave to them; one student was supposed to phone and make an appointment with Mr. Bake, but Mr. Baker is not in the office and his secretary answers the phone. Each student of a pair had a diary card of their role and they could not take a look at their partner’s diary card. During the activity, the researcher walked around the classroom to monitor the students’ activity. The students were practicing the dialogue with their partner very loudly and passionately. After ten minutes, she asked the students if they finished or not. They told her not yet; hence, she gave them another five minutes. When the students stopped practicing, she asked if there were any volunteers who want come to the stage to make a performance of their dialogues. A female and a male student came to the stage to start their performance. She asked the rest students to give them applause as they were the first pair and they were very brave. Meanwhile, she told the rest students that they should take them as an example and they should learn the spirit from them. In the following, there were other five pairs performing the role-play activity. In this meeting, the students were forbidden to bring worksheet in the activity, but they were allowed to take the diary card with the key information for the activity. During the activity, there were two students in different pairs who felt a little bit nervous at the beginning; they spoke with low voice; but after encouraged them to take a breath in a few seconds, they could perform the role-play activity. In this activity, most of the students conducted a good performance; they could correctly pronounce the words and expression as discussed previously. They also could fluently and smoothly perform the role-play activity, but however, they spoke slower than before as they spoke while looking at the diary card. As the time was limited, the researcher stopped the rest students told them if they had any problem of this meeting, but there were no problems with them. b Closing the class Seeing the students didn’t have much problem with this lesson, the researcher was going to close the class. Before closing the class, she asked the students how they commit to user xc felt about this lesson; they told her that it was good and they liked it; they were systematically taught how to make and receive a phone call and how to take and leave message. The researcher said it was great and closed the class by saying goodbye to the students. 2 The Second Meeting c Opening the class It was a warm and sunny afternoon. The researcher went to the classroom very early that day. When the bell rung, she greeted the students and checked the students’ attendance list. There were only two students absent that day as they told the researcher before the class that they needed to bring back their post parcel. That day’s topic was booking rooms in the hotel . d Main activity 1 Pre-task Before going to present the topic, the researcher gave some leading questions to the students by asking them if they ever lived in a hotel or if they ever booked a room in the hotel, and how they booked that room in the hotel, however, there were no students ever booked rooms in a hotel; then, the researcher asked them if they want to learn how to book a room in the hotel or not, they told her yes. The researcher started the topic by delivering the worksheet to the students and asking them to read the words and sentence patterns after her. After several rounds, the researcher asked some students to read the words and sentence patterns one by one in order to check their pronunciation. Happily, all of them could read the words and expressions with correct pronunciations. In order to help the students fully remember and master the words and sentence patterns, she gave them few minutes to practice and memorize the words and sentence patterns, and then asked them to conduct a competitive activity as stated in ACTIVITY 2. In the activity two, students were asked to translate the Chinese words and sentence patterns spoken by the researcher into English based on ACTIVITY 1 without commit to user xci looking at the worksheet. During the activity, when the researcher mentioned these Chinese words and sentence patterns, all of the students blurted out the right words and sentence patterns into English loudly; they felt excited and were striving to be the first one to say the related words and sentence patterns. Seeing the students didn’t have any problems about the words and sentence patterns, she moved to the ACTIVITY 3 and ACTIVITY 4. In activity three, first, the researcher discussed the short dialogue as listed on the worksheet, and explained to the students about how to book a room in the hotel directly; she explained: Usually we can book a room in the hotel both online or book the room in the hotel directly. For how to book a room in the hotel directly; the first thing is to locate the main lobby and front desk. Usually the front desk is near the front entrance of the hotel or there will be signs directing you to it. The second is to follow the directions if you have a reservation or not. - If you dont have a reservation, you can ask if they have any rooms available. If they are full or booked, youll need to find another hotel. - If you do, youll usually need some identification to verify your name. Some hotels require you to pay for the room before you get your key, and most hotels will require cash deposit if you do not have a debit or credit card. Cash or creditdebit card is acceptable in most places; some will have a check option, depending on the hotel. After you get the hotel key from the reservation desk, and ask for directions on how to get to your room. If you are given an electronic key and you are not sure how to use it, ask for directions. Before you leave your room, the front desk may tell you the time for breakfast for next morning, and also the time for checking out. After the discussion and explanation of how to book a room in the hotel directly, the researcher asked the students to practice the dialogue with their partner, and then fill in a table that mentions some necessary points for booking a room as listed in ACTIVITY 3. The students could fill the table easily. After that they continued the ACTIVITY 4. In this activity, the students were asked to fill in some blanks in a short dialogue with will, would, could. In the previous meeting, some students always said will instead of would as there actually should be would. The researcher asked the students what was the meaning or usage of the word “ would” , the students told her that it was the past tense of the word “ will” . The researcher said “ yes” , and asked “ any usage else?” The students kept silent. She explained to them that the word “ would” not only mean the past tense of will, but also showed the politeness. People who worked in the service field commit to user xcii always like to say would instead of will. After the explanation, She asked the students if they understood or not. They told her yes. So, she asked them to complete the blanks. The student could correctly complete the blanks in the short dialogue of ACTIVITY 4. Seeing the students didn’t have any problem of the words and sentence patterns, she went the task phase. 2 Task There were two activities in the task phase, and these two activities were role-play activities. In ACTIVITY 5, the students were asked to work in pairs; they were asked to create a dialogue and then conduct the dialogue based on the given information card with their partner in front of the class. In this activity, one student acted as a guest who was going to book a room in the hotel, and her or his partner would act as the receiver who was working in the front desk. In ACTIVITY 6, the students were still asked to take a role-play activity, but this time, they needed to change their roles with each other based on their roles in activity 5; that was, the student who acted as the receiver should change the role to be the guest. During the activity, the students seemed liked and got used to the way of teaching, they didn’t feel shy or nervous; they came to the platform immediately once the researcher called their names. Moreover, their speaking ability was getting better than the previous meetings. In this performance, except two students slipped tongues because they spoke too fast, all of them could say the words with correct pronunciations and could properly use the sentence patterns that were learned in the pre-task, Furthermore, compared with the previous meeting, the frequency for taking a look at the information card in this meeting was reduced. Most of them didn’t need to take a look at the information card as they have remembered the key information in mind, and some of them just created their own information. Here below was a dialogue created and conducted by a pair of students: Student A: Good evening May I help you, Madam? Student B: I’d like a room please. Student A: Certainly. Student B: How much is one? Student A: We have a variety of rooms from standard rooms to deluxe rooms, which one would you like to have? Student B: I’d like a standard room, please. Student A: It’s 120 per day. commit to user xciii Student B: Does it include breakfast? Student A: Yes, it does. The restaurant is located on the third floor. Student A: May I have your name, please? Student B: Sarah. Student A: Could you please spell it? Student B: Yes. S-A-R-A-H. Student A: How many people are there in your party? Student B: Just me. Student A: How many nights would you like to stay? Student B: I will stay here two days. Student A: Two nights 240. How would you like to pay? Student B: Cash. Student A: Ok, but we need to receive 300 as deposit, and it will be refunded when you check out. You may check out the 12: 00 at noon. Student B: Ok, no problem Student A: Thank you Could you please sign your name here? Ok, this is your key, and your room number is 805, in the eighth floor. Would you like a wake-up call? Student B: Yes, I’d like a morning call for 6:30 Student A: Enjoy your staying in Shangri-la Hotel. These two activities total together lasted for more than forty minutes. e Closing the class After conducting the task phase, there were only few minutes left. The researcher gave comments to the students’ performance and took a quick review of that lesson. As the bell rang, she ended the class and said goodbye to the students. 3 The third meeting a Opening the class It was a cloudy afternoon, and the weather was a little bit cold that day. The researcher entered the classroom, and the collaborator came in after her. She greeted the students and asked their conditions. Before she was going to introduce the topic, she asked the students some warm up questions. She asked what their favourite soups, dishes and the beverages were. They answered “ tomato and egg soup, 紫菜 laver and egg soup, kelp soup, Gongba o diced chicken, boiled fish, sweet and sour fish, （麻辣牛肉） sautéed beef with cayenne pepper etc. I like milk; I like orange juice, chrysanthemum tea.” The students spoke very loudly, and said some words in Chinese as they didn’t know how to say it in English. The researcher corrected it by saying it again. She also commit to user xciv explained to them how to translate the name of the Chinese dishes. She said: “actually, there is a rule for translating the dishes; when you translate some dishes; you can translate the way of how the dishes were cooked or cut in the past tense and then add the material of the dishes. For example, the Gongbao diced chicken as some students mentioned, Gongbao is a name of a place in the ancient times, diced is the way of how the chicken cut, and the chicken of course is the material.” She asked the students if they understood or not. They told her yes. She also asked them if they liked western food or had they ever eaten in a Western food restaurant. Some students replied her that they have eaten in a western food restaurant and they like the western food, while some other students told her that they haven’t eaten in a restaurant and they didn’t eat Western food. She asked them if they want to know what the western dishes were and how to take an order in a restaurant. The students felt happy and replied yes enthusiastically. After that, she told the students that that day they were going to talk about ordering in the restaurant. b Main activity 1 Pre-task The researcher distributed the worksheet to the students, and asked the students to complete the chart with words from the list in ACTIVITY 1. Before the activity, she explained and discussed the words with the students, and asked them read the words after her few times. After they fully understood the words, she gave them five minutes to discuss and complete the chart with their partner. After five minutes, she asked some student to read their answers. They could correctly read the words with good pronunciation. Seeing that, she moved to ACTIVITY 2. There were the sentence patterns for ordering dishes. She discussed the sentence patterns and asked the students to read the sentence patterns after her. After several times, she asked the students to look the dialogue in ACTIVITY 3. She asked them to practice the dialogue with their partner. She also asked the students to pay attention to the sentence patters for taking and making orders in the restaurant and the way how to take and make orders in the restaurant as later they needed to fill the blanks in ACTIVITY 4 and performed a role-play activity in ACTIVITY 5 without looking at the worksheet. The students followed her instruction and practiced the dialogue with their partner loudly and seriously; when the researcher commit to user xcv walked around the classroom, she heard many students practicing the dialogue with their partners using the correct tongue just like the native speaker. After few minutes, she stopped the students, and asked them to fill the blanks in the dialogue in ACTIVITY 4. As she had explained and discussed previously, they could easily fill the blanks with correct word forms in this dialogue. Before the researcher moved to the task phase, she asked the students if they had any problems in the previous activities, but they didn’t have, so she moved to the task phase. 2 Task performance In ACTIVITY 5, students were asked to conduct a role-play activity of taking and making orders in a coffeehouse. In this activity, students worked with their partner to create and conduct the dialogue in front of the class based on the given information. That was, one student worked as a customer ordering dishes in the restaurant based on the given information or he or she could create his or her own dishes, while another student worked as the waiter or waitress to take his or her orders. The researcher also told the students that they could use the dialogue in activity three as an example, and they could use the menu in activity 1 or they could create their own. Before the students conducted the activity, the researcher discussed and led the students to read the additional vocabularies that the students might use in the activity 5 as listed on the worksheet. After that she asked the students to conduct the role-play activity; she gave eight minutes to the students to prepare and practice the dialogue with their partner. After they finished, she asked one pair come to the front of the class to perform the role-play, and in order to make every students fully concentrate in the class, she told the rest students that they should listen carefully as she would like to ask them to give comments and suggestions for their classmate’ performance. She also told them that it would be better if they didn’t need to rely on the notebook as in the real world we could not bring a notebook and write the dialogue in it. The students could perform the activity without looking at their notebooks, and they performed well. The dialogue was as follows: Student A: Welcome to our restaurant. Have you made a reservation, madam? Student B: No, we haven’t made a reservation. Student A: How many people are there in your party? Student B: only two. Could we have the table near the window? Student A: Sure Please commit to user xcvi Student A: What would you like to eat? May I take your order? Student B: Yes. I’d like a tomato and cucumber salad and garlic bread please. Student A: All right. And what kind of dressing would you like? We have vinaigrette of Italian, and French. Student B: Italian, please. Student A: OK Well, what would you like to have for the main course? Student B: Yes. I’ll have spaghetti and meatball. Student A: And would you like anything to drink? Student B: Yes, I’d like a glass of iced tea with lemon, please. Student A: Anything else? Student B: That will be all. Thanks. Student A: Ok, please wait a moment. Student B: May I have the check, please? Student A: Yes, here it is. 280, after discount. What would you like to pay? Cash or credit card? Student B: Cash, please. After this pair conducted their performance, the rest students gave their comments and suggestion. They said that the performance of this pair was generally good, they could understand this pair’s dialogue, there were no many grammar mistakes found in their dialogue and they could speak fluently. When the researcher asked what the negative aspects of their speaking were. They replied that these two students sometimes liked to say “en…” during the performance. The researcher told the rest students that they were right, and they should avoid saying “en...er…” something like that, they should learn the positive aspects from these two students’ performance. She also told these two students that their performance was good and they should avoid say “en.” during the performance. The rest students performed one pair by one pair and they performed better and better. They also could change the menu by themselves. After the students’ comments and suggestions, the researcher also gave her comments and suggestion for each pair and the rest students, so that they could perform much better. This activity lasted almost forty minutes. As the time was limited, she had to stop the activity. The rest students who didn’t perform the activity seemed a little bit disappointed. she told them that they still had chance to conduct a role play activity as in last meeting there would be a role-play speaking test. c Closing the class commit to user xcvii The researcher ended the class by saying goodbye and Happy New Year to the students. Before closing the class, she asked the students to review what they had learned in all the three meetings at home and also told them not to be late as there would be a speaking test in next meeting. 4 Fourth meeting a Opening the class That day’s program was having a speaking test. The researcher entered the classroom with her collaborator. After greeting the students and asking their condition, she started the activity. b Conducting the test It was a role-play test. She explained the way of conducting the test to the students. The test consisted of three instruments. The first instrument was about telephoning ; Students were asked to take and make a phone call, and to take and leave a message with their partner based on the given information. The second instrument was about booking rooms in the hotel; two students took roles as a customer and a receptionist respectively to perform the activity of booking a room in a hotel, while the third instrument was that one students took the role of a customer to make an order in the restaurant and another student worked as the waiter or waitress take the order. The students were asked to take one instrument only and the instrument and the roles were given randomly by the researcher, and the students were asked to take the test randomly. In this way, all the students could be ready to take their turns. The students were called pair by pair to come to the front of the class to present their topics. The researcher and the collaborator gave the score to each student. The test ran well. There was no problem with their performance. c Closing the class Having finished the test, the researcher gave general review about the whole activities that they had done during the research. She hoped that they could maintain their participation in the speaking class.

c. Observation

commit to user xcviii The observation was conducted during the cycle by the researcher and her collaborator. The focuses of attention were the teacher, the students’ performance, and the classroom situation in the teaching and learning process. The detail result is reported as following: In the first meeting, the teacher gave leading questions to arise the students’ interest about the topic. Because the students were weak in the pronunciation in the first cycle; in this cycle, the teacher led the students to read the words and sentence patterns, and asked the students to play some competitive games to practice the vocabularies and sentence patterns. In the task phase, the teacher gave much time to the students to perform the role-play activities based on a given information card. During the activity, the students felt eager to conduct their performance in front of the class. There was a pair of volunteer students who requested to conduct the role-play activity in front of class without being asked to do so. The other students came to the platform immediately, once the teacher called their names. For their performance, most of the students conducted a good performance; they could correctly pronounce the words and expressions as discussed and practiced previously. They also could fluently and smoothly perform the role-play activity; however, some of the students spoke slower than before as they spoke while looking at the diary card. In the second meeting, the teacher still asked the students to make drills about the words and sentence patterns as she found it was workable for the students to master the sentence patterns and the words and their pronunciations. The teacher also gave very detail explanation about the topics, while the students were looking at the teacher and listening very carefully. In the task phase, students were asked to conduct the role-play activity. The students seem liked and got used to the way of teaching, they didn’t felt shy or nervous during their performance. Moreover, their speaking ability was getting better than the previous meetings. This time, except two students who slipped tongues because they spoke too fast, all of them could properly use the words and sentence patterns with correct pronunciations. Furthermore, compared with the previous meeting, the frequency for taking a look at the information card in this meeting was reduced. Most of the commit to user xcix students didn’t need to take a look at the information card as they have remembered the key information in mind, and some of them just created their own information. In the third meeting, the teacher reminded the students that it would be better if they didn’t need to take a look of their paper while conducting their performance. Most of the students followed the teacher’s suggestion and didn’t bring their notebooks, and they conducted their performance well. Moreover, the students were asked to give their own comments and suggestions to their friends’ performance. By doing this, the students could get experience from their friends, and could improve themselves. Their performance was getting better and better from pair to pair, and the mispronunciation of the words was reduced. Meanwhile, in the second cycle the teacher had improved the preparation of the content or topics selection. The students found the content was not difficult, and they liked it; they also showed great interest in the topics. In the second cycle, the teacher gave detail discussion about the topics and gave much time to the students to practice what they had learned. The teacher also used some activities to get all the students involved in the task performance. The whole classroom situation was alive. The students showed high participation in the speaking activities and they actively took their speaking turns. There were many students wanted to share their performance with their classmates as they could get improvement of their performance. Besides the active and good performance in the class, the students achievements also indicated in the high scores of their performance test; in the fourth meeting, the students were asked pair by pair to conduct a role-play based on the given topic in front the researcher and the collaborator, while the researcher and the collaborator marked their scores. During the speaking test, the students showed great improvement in their speaking ability. They could produce the language with little mistakes in vocabularies, sentence patterns, and pronunciations. They showed their highest ability in the task performance. They could smoothly and fluently conduct the activities with their friends based on the given information. They didn’t feel shy or afraid of making mistake, and most of them didn’t need to take a look at the notebook while conducting the activities. Moreover, the mother tongue use was also found to be reduced in the class. The students made a great progress on their speaking ability, as shows in the following table, the commit to user c students’ score was improved from cycle to cycle: the average score of fluency at the pre-test is 11.8, the post-test 1 is 12.1, and at the post test 2 is 13.4,; vocabulary pre-test is 11.6, post-test 1 is 12.5, and post-test 2 is 13.3; grammar pre-test is 12.2, post-test 1 is 13.1, and post-test 2 is 13.4; pronunciation pre-test is 12.3, post-test 1 is 12.3, and post-test 2 is 13.4; and comprehension pre-test is 11.8, post-test 1 is 13.1, and the post-test 2 is 13.6. The average score of speaking ability was improved. The average of the pre-test is 59.6, post-test 1 is 63.2, and the post-test 2 is 67. Table 4.9 The Comparison of the Students’ Speaking Score in the Pre-test, Post-test 1 in the Cycle 1, and Post-test 2 in Cycle 2. Test Fluen. Vocabu. Gram. Pron. Comprehen. Total Pre-test 11.8 11.6 12.2 12.3 11.8 59.6 Post-test 1 12.1 12.5 13.1 12.3 13.1 63.2 Post-test 2 13.4 13.3 13.4 13.4 13.6 67 Besides the speaking ability in each speaking aspect, the following table also provided the data about students who passed the passing grade. The result of the students speaking grade was also significant improved. Table 4.10 The Comparison of the Percentage of Students Who Passed the Passing Grade in Each Cycle LEVEL PRE-TEST CYCLE 1 CYCLE 2 Student No. percentage Student No. percenta ge Student No. percenta ge Under Averag e 17 45 10 26 Averag e 20 52 23 61 26 68 Above Averag e 1 3 5 13 12 32 Passing Grade 65 11 28 16 42 26 68 Note: Under Average : Students’ speaking score in the scale of 50-59 Average : Students’ speaking score in the scale of 60-69 Above Average : Students’ speaking score in the scale of 70-79 commit to user ci From the table above, it can be seen that there were improvement in the students’ grade for speaking class. The passing grade was 65, and it was hoped that 25 students or 65 students could pass from the passing grade. Actually, it was 68 students who passed the passing grade in the second cycle and no students were below the average score. The goal of the research was achieved.

d. Reflecting

This was the final stage in cycle two which was also the final cycle of the study. This stage was aimed to evaluate the final result of the action conducted in the second cycle accompanied with the analyses of its strengths and weaknesses. Based on the observation result and the students’ score in the second cycle, the collaborator and the researcher reflected some important aspects during the implementation of CBI in cycle 2. The aspects are as follows: 1 The strength: a CBI can improve students’ speaking ability. CBI is an approach rather than a method, it is very flexible. First of all, CBI can apply different activities and also can adjust it to meet the students’ needs and interests. In the class, the teacher can adopt different activities to improve students’ different speaking aspects. By providing interesting and practical activities, the students could master the vocabularies and grammatical forms related to the topics easily. As you can see in the second cycle, the teacher applied some different tasks to help the students to achieve the students’ fluency; during the performance, the support and guidance from the teacher and their partners were always available. In the group works, the members of the same group also reminded their friends what’s was the next points and how to say it. b CBI changes the classroom situation into more alive. The classroom situation was improved and became more alive than before. The students’ participation in the speaking activities was increased. They were active and afraid of leg behind in conducting the task. Besides, because the topics were very close to their daily life and their future jobs, they felt great motivation to join the activities. In addition, before the action research, the teacher dominated the class and the speaking commit to user cii class was a reading type of activity, but now it was replaced by the speaking activities and the students dominated the speaking class. Moreover, the teacher was getting more experienced and more innovative in teaching speaking; she tried to explore every effort to make the class more interesting. 2 The weakness Generally, during the teaching and learning process of cycle 2, the collaborator and the researcher did not find some significant weaknesses or obstacles. Most students could speak well, and their speaking ability was effectively improved; only two or three students were still found to bring their notebooks and sometimes need to take a look at their notebooks during the speaking activities.

C. The Findings and Discussions